Dan Hodges is a former Labour Party and GMB trade union official, and has managed numerous independent political campaigns. He writes about Labour with tribal loyalty and without reservation. You can read Dan's recent work here

The Olympics are over: it's time to face economic reality

Govezilla prepares to eat his 30th school athletics facility of the morning

A new craze is sweeping the land. Or if not quite the land, that section of it that spends its time on Twitter. It’s called Olympic Twitoption.

The premise is simple. You go to the league table that was published earlier in the week showing Team GB’s Twitter feeds, and the number of followers they’d put on during the games. You ignore the big names at the top, like the Tom Daleys and Mo Farahs, and find an athlete with a relatively small number of followers who hasn’t spent all that much time in the headlines over the course of the games. Then you "adopt" them. Or in other words you start following them, hopefully all the way to Rio in 2016.

Suddenly, at the flick of a switch, you have a direct investment in their success. Their hopes, dreams, pitfalls and triumphs, become yours. You can send them words of encouragement, keep the rest of the Twitterati appraised of the progress, and write stern words to your local MP wanting to know why they aren’t be provided with the funding they need to bring home a medal in four years' time. It’s a bit like when Amnesty International gets people to write to a foreign government on behalf of a prisoner of conscience. Or like buying a Tamagotchi.

I’ve adopted Katie Clark, who was part of the team which came 6th in the Olympic synchronised swimming. Plus her mum, Jeanne, who apparently acts as Katie’s loyal chauffeur. When I announced my adoption plan, both Katie and Jeanne sent me nice messages in response. Imagine if I’d tried that with a member of the England football team. I’d be more likely to get a request for bail surety.

Yep, I’m on Team Clark until the day she brings home meticulously synchronised aquatic Brazilian gold. “Sad,” I hear you say. “The Olympics are over; let it go”, echoes the cry. To which I have this response: Michael Gove.

Once we had Thatcher the Milk Snatcher; now we’ve got Gove the Gold Snatcher. “Why aren’t we winning as many medals as we did in London, Daddy? Is it the heat or the altitude?” “No darling, it’s the devil Gove.”

OK, can we all take a step back a second. I can’t claim to be an expert of the inner workings of the School Playing Fields Advisory panel, whose advice Michael Gove has apparently discarded, and I’m sure it is staffed by fair and independently minded people. But I would guess many of their members have a bit of a soft spot for school playing fields. The clue would appear to be in the title.

Then there is the is the question of just how many places are left for our budding junior Ennises and Rutherfords after their dreams have been cruelly crushed beneath the bulldozer’s tracks. The Department of Education doesn’t hold figures for the number of sports fields in the UK. But what it does say is that there are 24,000 schools in the country, all of whom currently have access to outside sports facilities. Given that the maximum length of an Olympic running track is 400 metres, that would indicate that even after the loss of these 30 sites there’s still a bit of space left.

But there’s a much more fundamental point that needs to be made as we crouch low in the blocks in preparation for our post-Olympic moral panic. Bradley Wiggins, Victoria Pendleton and the rest of Team GB performed some magical feats in the course of that 16 days. But they didn’t manage to eradicate the deficit, or reduce the debt. They did not provide a solution to the eurozone collapse or the banking crisis. While the Olympics made us forget our problems for a couple of joyous weeks, they came nowhere near to solving them.

We live in a country that is cutting the number of serving police officers, that does not have aircraft for our aircraft carriers, that is slashing financial support for educational basics via the axing of EMA and increases in tuition fees. And yet the nation is preparing to march to the barricades over 30 sports pitches?

When are people on both the Left and Right of the political spectrum going to wake up to economic and political reality? Tough choices on public spending means just that. It doesn’t involve doing away with things we don’t need, it means doing away with things we do need. And it’s about prioritising. Of course we should try to protect school sports fields. But not at the expense of soldiers, or police officers or nurses.

Yes, we may well have secured a financial legacy from the success of the Olympics. But claiming the route to tackling the current fiscal crisis is through subsidising sporting infrastructure which may mean that a handful of our eight- or nine-yearolds may develop into athletes who may at some point in the future bring home the Olympic bacon isn’t farsighted: it’s ridiculous economic abstraction.

We must try to keep the flame alive, and retain as much as we can of the spirit of that amazing fortnight. But nor can we let its glow blind us to reality. We came into the Olympics a nation in the grip of austerity, and as the gates of the Stratford stadium swing shut austerity has not relinquished its grip.

Which is why the rest of us do indeed have to learn to let go ourselves. We’ve had our party, and what a party it was. But now’s the time for a dose of reality.

Not that I’ll be letting go completely. I’ll still be tweeting my encouragement to Katie and her mum as they work toward her moment of triumph in Rio. Perhaps Michael Gove could follow her as well.